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Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

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Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#121

Post by dfc »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #16
brador wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really the solution we were looking for Matt. Can we replace the + operator with something else? How about¬? We don't use that very often to the point I don't even know what it's called, but it's there on the keyboard in one keypress.

I'll pass the feedback on. Part of the issue with + is that it turned out a lot of people were mistyping queries with + when as far as we could tell, they weren't trying to match an exact word. Getting further off the beaten path with a more rare character might help though.

Westlaw search syntax would be awesome!!!

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#122

Post by Steko »

barrkel wrote: post #117
JoshTriplett wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.

Fully agree with this. Approximately 90% of the time Google thinks I misspelled something, it's wrong.

For me it's the opposite but I'd love to be able to manually toggle these things on or off.

My ideal setup might be to get url bar searches to show regular google and ctrl-k searches to be google verbatim searches.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#123

Post by moultano »

tamersalama wrote: post #94
moultano wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's tempting but please don't speculate like that, it raises my blood pressure. :) Google keeps ranking changes completely siloed from the ad side of the company, and the decision makers about ranking changes don't see statistics about how it might effect ads. We don't even have a way of collecting that data. (At least as far as I've ever seen.)

I couldn't resist the speculation temptation :) Correct me if I'm wrong; When I'm searching for (unquoted) "Canadian equivalent to SOPA Bill". I'm getting results about Soap, Telenovela, Spas, Dishwasher Soap, TV shows (and 1 related hit). The result, as you mentioned, could be ranked independent of Ads, but the Ad spectrum is wider (Soaps, Spas, Soap operas, TV shows, etc...) [I'm not getting any in this particular…

Ads has a very sophisticated system of matching ad topics against queries. That's how they make the big money. :) I work in search though, so I don't really know anything about how it works except at an extremely high level. I'd be really surprised if that sort of effect actually happened though.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#124

Post by moultano »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #102
moultano wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch. What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and t…

> What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. Excellent insight. Linux kernel developers have had a similar experience with the use of the likely() and unlikely() hints on conditionals; it took a while to realize that unli…

Send over the examples when you come across them (or if you have it turned on, try www.google.com/searchhistory/ to find queries you've issued in the past.) I'll make sure they get to the right place.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#125

Post by jerrya »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #42
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.

Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.

This is especially true on Android and other low bandwidth/hard to type devices, where I have time and again searched for the specific exact thing I am looking for only to have instant search and spelling correction help me find something I could not care less about.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#126

Post by jerrya »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #2

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so…

Can you confirm or discuss more about what this does to the "filter bubble?"

In two windows of the same browser, I typed gyros, one immediately offered me an instant search result of gyros Phoenix (where I currrently am), the other window, in verbatim mode offered me gyros, gyroscope, and gyros recipe.

(Don't ask me why I tried gyros as my search example.)

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#128

Post by wooster »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #2

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so…

Thanks Matt. This helps with at least one of my complaints about the direction Google search has been heading.

(Now if you'd just eliminate that godawful slow URL redirector on result links…)

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#129

Post by fuzzythinker »

tomkarlo wrote: post #107

I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having pro…

Counter example:

I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried +"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation.

There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actually likes the new google search.

Btw, what's the answer? Only link I found was [1] someone says it's REH-sig, not REE-sig (not too sure what's the difference). But I'm more interested on how to pronounce the second part, is it more like "side"("sign" minus 'n'), "seed", "sad", or something else?

[1] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not...

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#130

Post by gergles »

rkudeshi wrote: post #46
Kuiper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What search engine do you use now, out of curiosity?

Probably DuckDuckGo.

Yes, DDG. My only complaint is that it is slower than Google, but it's worth it to me to get the results for what I actually typed the first time.
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